Not about me, but about what I love to do.

Knots in the contemporary space

The Annodanza or knot-dancing is a meeting between geometric and organic forms, between the space within the project and an emotional state.
This duality merges on the canvas' monocrome surface.
It's a doodle, a lump, or even better, an existential mark spontaneously transferred on a blank slate.
Giusi Loisi belongs to the post feminist art generation, she doesn't use brushes but rope, thread, wool in order to create a statement from the soul: Knot-dancing (Annodanze).
This term, in Italian represents the encounter between the dramatic nature of the knot and the lightness of dance.
Most of the times her knots are not haphazardly done, but instead they are as neatly composed as snow flakes, or resemble sea urchins or are as threatening as a virus. They look organic and tridimensional. They are like an obsession or an emotional entanglement that emerges, painting after painting. They are unspoken thoughts, subconscious material which takes shape and presents itself to the world with impeccable formality.
The rope ties, mends the tears. It designates an unconscious object and becomes a trace.
How many times women have used in their art the same material they were trained to use in order to be quiet executors of preprinted embroidery on small dish towels?
Well, women artists have used the same material to break with traditions and a destiny already sealed.
Loisi makes holes with an awl into the canvas as Luicio Fontana used to do for his "Concetti Spaziali", then she quickly heals the wounds and instinctively fixes, reconstructs the fragmented by creating "Nodi Spaziali" (Spacial Knots).
The Annodanza is the gesture within a specific atmosphere. In the western female version, it brings to mind Shodo: the Art of Japanese calligraphy practiced using rope rather than a brush.
The secret of Shodo is the communion between the mind and the soul.
The Annodanze are created in different colors and take inspiration from the natural and animal world with the artist's very personal sensibility.
The surface is not always monochrome. Sometimes the knots appear on a printed image: a woman, a musical score, a building.
Although Loisi's work follows her very personal path, she is also presenting through her paintings the problematic human condition with its alienation and restrictions. Both as a female and male reality.
The thread is for her the road that leads to the beginning . Or, alternatively both the problem and the solution: distress and vitality.
The Annodanze brings to mind Penelope with her day time weaving and nighttime unraveling, thus she is the metaphor of the irrational unraveling of life itself. The mental state of Shodo is defined as mushin, light hearted. The Annodanze are opening a door to freedom in an ambiguous and uncertain destiny.
They tie the earthly world to the spiritual world and reveal themselves as an entity (or (無心) that means empty mind/the unknown). Never the same.